THE HISTORY OF HARD DISK DRIVES:

The hard disk drive traces their history back to 1950s with the IBM Model 350 disk storage. Hard disk drives were used to be very bulky and burdensome in its early days. Therefore very careful and cautious handling was also required in addition with a lot of space and maintenance area which was dedicated for the storage of these storage devices. The power consumption was also too much making them more costly. Before 1980s, hard disks used to have platters of size up to 14 inches. Therefore, a lot of floor space was also requires, especially for removable media.

The motors used in such type of hard disks were also of gigantic type and required a lot of power to run. This made them useless for microcomputers or personal computers, because not an ordinary person could afford it. Only large organizations that could not have their work on paper at any cost use to ask for these mammoth hard disk drives.

STONE AGE:

The earliest known hard disk drive is, as stated earlier, the IBM 350 Disk File. The hard disk was invented by Reynold Johnson and it was introduced in 1956 in IBM 305 RAMAC Computer systems. The hard disk was composed of fifty platters, each having size of 24 inch. This made the total capacity of the hard disk only up to 5 million characters. Only two heads were used to access the entire platters and it was purely obvious; the wastage of time, lack of efficiency and effectiveness.

A little bit later, in 1961, IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit was introduced. The revolution was that each platter had a different head minimizing the access time to a lot many degrees down. As a result, effectiveness and efficiency also increased.

The IBM 3340 Winchester hard disk drive's technology is among the current and latest technologies that are used to manufacture hard disk drives. This hard disk drive was first in its series of low power and consumer-friendly hard drives. The capacity was also inspiring and enormous in comparison to the competitors. It came in variety of 35 MB and 70 MB disk space. This memory came with two spindles of data modules.

THE EVOLUTION:

The evolution in the hard disk drives' industry came with the Seagate's ST-506. This hard disk truly revolutionized the computer industry and introduced hard disks which can easily be used in microcomputers and consumed very little power as compare to the older versions. The first hard disk introduced in this series was 5.25 inches and could store a maximum amount of data of only 5 MB.

QUICK REVIEW OVER THE HISTORY:

But, in 1980, IBM 3380: first gigabyte hard disk drive ever designed came into being. The size of the hard disk was that of a refrigerator and weight 250 kg. In 1986, SCSI was standardized. In 1991, small 2.5 inch hard disk drive was introduced with capacity of only 100 MBs. In 1992, 1.3 inch hard disk drive was first introduced. In 1996, IBM used Giant MR technology for reading sensors of the hard disks. In 1999, IBM introduced hard disk drives up to 240 MBs. In 2005, the standard became that of Serial ATA 3G. Finally, in 2007, first hard disk drive of 1 terabyte space was introduced by Hitachi GST. In 2008, capacity rose to 1.5 terabytes and it finally reached 2.0 terabytes by Western Digital in 2009.

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